Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

  “There’s a lesson for her to unlearn,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Bearce asked.

  “She’s going to associate sudden bright light with food. If I shone the flashlight into the tank again, she wouldn’t be frightened—but she’d expect another goody to blunder into her apartment.”

  “They can learn that fast?”

  I grinned. “Faster than a lot of students.”

  “Let’s see.” Bearce looked around. “Can we find another thing to toss into—”

  “No.”

  He turned back to me, the question in his face.

  “Because then she’ll really have a problem.” I pushed myself up to my feet. “She’ll ignore other prey cues and wait for that light. And there’s a good chance she’ll starve.”

  Now, of course, it wouldn’t do but Bearce and Zhádāo wanted to see an adult. I made no promises. It’s possible and we’ll see were all I’d give them. I knew we’d reach the point of crawling around in the dirt, poking light into crevices and holes like a group of Second Wave babies, but I wanted to monitor their level of stamina and enthusiasm for a while yet.

  For the most part, they found the trek easy. Sometimes, when we encountered the great photosynthesizing roots of the gordon tree, we clambered; and when we turned in towards the lake, we encountered traces of an overflow that had turned the ground to mud, and so we trudged. More times than I would have liked, I found myself turning my face away from Bearce’s interrogatory gleam: I hurt.

  When I thought we’d reached a reasonable halfway point, I stopped and declared mealtime. After we ate, I’d lead them gradually back to our original camp. They’d already been through enough; no sense in brutalizing them any more on their first day.

  We’d lucked upon what Second Wave had dubbed a scratch: a narrow glade created by the fall of a massive hardwood. Just as Earth bovids had formed depressions in the dirt from persistent rolling in one favored spot, so some of the larger reptilians made small clearings in the arboros from using one particular tree to rub against. After years of multi-ton animals buffing themselves against its trunk, eventually the tree gave up and fell over.

  “Is it for scent-marking?” Zhádāo asked as we arranged ourselves on the massive bole. She tucked her legs beneath her, remarkably limber for a spacer who’d just pulled a five-klik hike. Bearce, less spry, hauled himself up behind her. He sat camp-fashion. I noticed how his shin grazed her back as he crossed his legs.

  I looked for the Beast. He stood off to the side, paying no overt attention to us, but focused outward into the arboros.

  “See something?” I called.

  “There’s a lot to see,” he said. “There’s a lot to hear, too.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  For answer he unslung the Magdeburg, attention still riveted on a point several meters out into the green, to my left. I dropped my walking stick and kicked off of the tree so that its bulk lay between me and whatever might appear.

  At a quick check the GPS showed one figure moving in our direction. “Get down,” I hissed, and readied the Varangar. The trunk bounced and shuddered as Zhádāo and Bearce scrambled off, and I waited until they crouched beside me before taking a sight.

  Bearce was muttering notes. “The tension is palpable. I can feel my heart racing, and I’m almost sick with adrenaline. I can’t imagine what will—”

  “Shut up with that,” I snapped.

  “We can smell it, too,” the Beast said.

  Now I could hear it too: a rhythmic, careless crashing, a great body maundering through the arboros. Vegetation crunched at every step. I ran through my mental catalog of possibilities. Theropod or sauropod? Besora? Unlikely, in these humid lowlands. Axehead? Perhaps, but they traveled in tromps of three or more, much noisier.

  A castiglia leaf the size of a dinner platter sailed silently down from the canopy to land in a drift of puce at the Beast’s foot. Ahead and to our left, a stand of ferny saplings rustled wildly, then bent aside, under the pressure of a questing hand.

  I recognized it: scaled, mottled fawn and olive. With my foot I nudged Zhádāo. “Rifle ready,” I whispered.

  “What is it?” From Bearce, not Zhádāo.

  The hand pushed back the branches further. A beaked snout thrust through the leaves, arcing up to a thin nasal. At the center of two great facial discs, golden eyes burned, forward-facing eyes: which in the lexicon of zoology meant predator. Bubocephale. One of the lesser therapods, intelligent and adaptable, but a good first kill.

  “He can smell us,” I murmured, my focus funneled on the animal ten meters downwind of us. “Certainly he can see us. He hasn’t figured out we’re edible, yet. So if you’re scared, stay still. If you’re not scared, stay still.”

  The bubocephale took one step out of the cover of the trees, lithe as a sapling. A perfect specimen of a young adult male, he stood a little over one and a half meters, exhibiting the gracile build typical of his family.

  “This is a good one,” I whispered to Zhádāo. “Don’t go for an eye-shot—too risky. When he moves out, take him in the throat, or in the breast.”

  She swallowed audibly and shifted her stance.

  “Don’t take too long,” I added.

  “Right.”

  The bubocephale stretched his neck, trying to get a better fix on us, and Zhádāo’s slug took him right at the base of the throat in a perfect shot. The bullet had lacked the power to blow out the spinal column, but blood jetted out in an accusatory spurt: she’d hit the carotid.

  “Nice!” I yelled.

  “It’s not dead,” Zhádāo spat out. She raised her rifle; I thrust out an arm and pushed it down.

  “It’s dead,” I said. “Just a little slow to realize it.”

  Confused, the bubocephale crouched down in its standard threat-defense posture, digits flexing and closing, tail beating the litter on the forest floor. The step it took depleted the last of the oxygen store in its brain, and it crashed to the ground.

  Dead, yes, for all its twitching. No need to spend another slug into it, no need to scream at everyone to get back while I dealt with it. I tried to release my breath in a diffuse exhale, playing it cool for the camera.

  I got to my feet and smiled down at Zhádāo, who remained crouched beside the trunk. “Congratulations, General. That was a perfect kill.” I extended a hand to help her up; she ignored it and stood, her gaze riveted to the dead reptile.

  Bearce stood up, scanning between Zhádāo and the bubocephale. That’d have to be edited, I thought; don’t want the audience puking from motion sickness.

  “Back up a bit, Bearce,” I said. “Get a widescreen with all of us in the viewer.”

  “It won’t look natural,” he grumbled, at which even Zhádāo laughed.

  I slapped her companionably on the back. “That’s more like it. Come on, it’s portrait time.”

  Privately I lamented my decision not to bring the scanner on this foray. The skeletal structure of the bubocephale, particularly the skull, provided hours of speculation and study for the biologists. Those bony eye disks for which we named it—what purpose did they serve? The same as an owl’s, or different, or in addition to? I’d collected two other specimens over the past four years; each one—as was every creature I killed—a mine of information.

  Information . . . there was a way I could take more than notes on the voca recorder, though. I singled out Bearce. “You’re uploading? Or is your head on wetware?”

  “Both,” he replied, one hand coming up to the delicate bow of his retinal cam.

  “If you wanted to, could you download just a piece to the Ubasti Net?”

  He nodded assent, and I waved him over. I showed him where to stand, warned him not to vomit, and pulled on my gloves. Again, I felt that irritating disjunction of my attention. Properly my whole focus should be on my knife and the animal. But only a meter or so away stood the Beast, relaxed, the rifle in his hands. Every time my gaze pricked up toward him, he was l
ooking into the growth around us, or watching what I did. Never did he appear to be particularly inclined to commit slaughter.

  I poised my knife above the sternum. Most reptiles on Ubastis were quadrupedal, which meant the scales on their backs, necks, and heads had evolved into truly impressive plate armor. Their ventral surfaces remained relatively smooth-scaled, relying on the animal’s position for protection. Evolution had granted the bubocephale a happy medium between the two types of hide: tough plate manifested in tiny scales no bigger than Bibi’s thumbnail. It was from this tesserae of keratin that the gracile therapods of Ubastis took the name of its family, Musaica.

  “Owlheads spend a lot of time grooming,” I said. “There’s a lot of vegetable matter or dead flesh that can get lodged.” With the tip of my knife I indicated a patch to one side of the breastbone, by the armpit. Strands of veronica’s hair creeper had caught in the scaled fold. “And you see these?” The blade winked against maroon shreds snagged across the pectoral region, glistening with the fresh blood. “This little guy’d eaten recently.”

  “If this is an example of little, I move we don’t go hunting anything larger.” Zhádāo said.

  “Oh, he’s little. I mean, compared with some of the others in the theropod order.”

  “You’re talking about Montjak’s besora, aren’t you? And the alligator I’ve heard about—”

  “Anakapotamos,” I supplied. “But King Anak isn’t a theropod, it’s a crocodyliform—”

  “Meat-eating, right?” Bearce said. “Dangerous? You’ve hunted them before, right?” He leaned forward. “Which would be harder to kill, Commander?”

  “Anakapotamos,” I said, without hesitation. Damn his titillating little digs.

  “Really? Why?”

  I explained to him about surface area, about points of vulnerability until his eyes began to glaze—admittedly not a very long time—and then, straddling the reptile in a primeval crouch, I made my first incision. Blood welled up. Bearce cursed; flinched.

  “That’s gonna make a mess,” the Beast commented.

  “That’s right,” I said, cutting quickly. “Better step back, Bearce, you don’t want this on you. The smell of old blood draws all kinds of attention.”

  They recoiled when I opened the reptile along the midline, from throat to crotch.

  With a smile I invited Bearce to approach. “Here you see the sternum, which is simple in comparison to a human’s—not as flexible . . .”

  “It looks like a human’s, though.”

  I glanced up at Bearce. He had his hand over his mouth, curbing a series of swallows. “Ten years ago,” I said, “we wouldn’t have been allowed to puke anywhere. You would’ve had to catch it in your hat.”

  “Right,” he said in a strangled voice.

  “Don’t move,” I said. “Keep that focus. Think about your contribution to science.”

  The Beast slid up behind him. “We can hold his head, if you need it.”

  To his credit, Bearce remained still. It couldn’t have been easy; if he shut his eyes longer than a decisecond, the cam ceased to record. How fresh and awful it must have appeared to him, the colors vivid to the point of hallucination: olive scales, white bone, pearly ligaments, the scarlet oozing over all, beading on my yellow gloves.

  Lacking a saw or bone-cracker, I decided to focus on those parts a mere knife could lay open for inspection. A lecture on theropod intestinal structure would be unnecessarily cruel to my clients. I made two more cuts, perpendicular to the first vertical incision, and peeled open the four flaps. The hide was slippery, hard to handle.

  “Beast,” I said, “you’re not squeamish, are you?” A rhetorical question. “Come help.”

  He followed directions well. With his knife he pinned down one triangular section, and, gloveless, held open two others. I was distinctly less comfortable squatting than he seemed—wouldn’t it be nice to have a proper theater table for this!—and my knee was waking up, muttering through the coolant and the inhibitor patch. I remembered the lecture, though.

  I rode over the pain as best as I could, concentrating on the deliberate exposition of the hepatic-piston diaphragm. The same structure had been found in extinct reptiliads on Earth, and the galactic scientific community had just about pissed itself with excitement to discover such a formation in a living being other than a Terran croc.

  I splayed back the final segment of skin, revealing the viscera in all of its blood-soaked, membraned glory. Using my knife as a pointer I indicated the area of the pericardial region, described the difference between alveolar and spetate lungs, and traced the thoracic-abdominal subdivision of the visceral cavity. A little digging revealed the diaphragm, and I sketched the muscles that powered it, which extended between the pubis and the liver.

  “On Earth, this lung, formed like a bellows, and its diaphragm wouldn’t be the most efficient system for procuring maximal rates of respiratory gas exchange. But in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of Ubastis, a more efficient lung design isn’t necessary.” I fixed the cam with my most sober expression. “At this time we measure Ubastis oxygen levels to be thirty-two percent. A drop of more than two percent will likely cause significant extinction.”

  “What’s that mean?” Bearce asked.

  “It means that if we’re not careful the dead will teach us only about the dead,” I replied, still fixing the cam with my stare. Not thinking about Bearce’s finely engineered hazel eye watching me, but those following him—who could I reach, whom was I speaking to, to what ghosts unborn how many years into the future . . .?

  Zhádāo broke the silence. She advanced, her steps slow, to the bubocephale’s head. “I’d like to touch it.”

  “Sure.” I sprawled back abruptly, tired and sore, and stabbed the knife into the ground. The gloves peeled off with a snap and went, bloody, into my pack.

  Death dulled the bubocephale’s yellow eyes. Already the corneas were drying; soon they would blacken. Zhádāo touched the concentric rings spreading out to form the facial disc. Her fingers brushed the pebbly scales, skimmed to the beaky mouth. Her mouth clamped into a grim line. Stiffly she brought her hand down to the kill wound, but stopped just short of wetting skin with blood.

  “This is where I shot it.”

  “Indeed,” I said, interested. Maybe, maybe I could get through. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Beast focus on her as well.

  “I killed it.”

  “You did.”

  “And you’ve done this before—how many times have you done this? Twenty? Fifty? Over a hundred times? How do you do it? How can you talk about dead animals as if you’re sorry and then kill them like this?”

  The unanswerable question. I countered with a question of my own. “Why did you pull the trigger?”

  “I—” She stopped, eyes narrowing. “But I don’t defend them the way you do.”

  She heard her own words hanging in the air; I did not look at her, but struggled to my feet with the stick’s help. I hated the truth of what she said, despised and feared such hubris. It was as if I’d set myself up as some kind of Animal Master, a female Cernunnos, a Diana.

  In my most bitter heart I bared my teeth and clung to the things of this world with all my might: mine, mine, mine, I hissed ceaselessly; even in my dreams. Mine my child, mine my lover, mine my body.

  “Zhádāo,” I said, shouldering my rifle, “I fully expect that someday soon I’ll be ripped from limb to limb by one of our Ubasti bioforms. Vengeance works in mysterious ways.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  If a person wanted wetware, she had a whole taxon to choose from. Everything from implanted quantum dots for stimulating faulty glands, to the thalamus vid-link beloved of journalists like our Colin Bearce, to the nano-neuroprocessors uniting the superluminal ships with their pilots. On occasion I thought it might be handy to be permanently jacked into the Ubastis Net. It had to be easier than fiddling with my GPS palm.

  Natch that I was, I sat on a rock keying data into the titaniu
m-encased hand-held. The morning sun dashed to shards on the lake’s surface; it made me mis-read the screen, swear silently. To the northeast of the continent, a whorl of low pressure hung like a galaxy, weeks early. If the weather continued in the same pattern across the continent, my time was running out more quickly than I had planned.

  Four days. Four days left in my week, four days before Joop returned in unintentional rescue. In thought I gnawed my lip, picked up a stick, and began to scrawl in the silty beach. Lunging cross-hatches, spiked suns, spirals segued into gouged calligraphy. If the rainy season descended on us before time, UBI would cancel the hunt, my client taken on a second-best tour (guesting at some chief administrator’s domicile in another city), and I would be under instruction to return to New Albuquerque. Not in disgrace, as far as UBI was concerned; oh, no. I’d simply move into the quiet phase of my life as I did each year. Three, four months of vegetative contentment interspersed with political appearances. Growing food for my fellow citizens. Luxuriating in Bibi’s days. And every sweetly ordinary moment would muffle my soul.

  The lanyard on my Varangar slipped from my shoulder and I pushed it up, the rifle butt grating against the rock. I could hear Bearce muttering in the background. “. . . A sublimated, feminine sexuality, if you will. There’s barely a square centimeter of skin to be seen below the neck, but the Ubastis—Ubastians—Ubastids—fuck it, the locals; we’ll fix that. But the locals revel in almost every other sensory and tactile display: women and men swath themselves in voluminous folds of exquisite material of the most dizzying shades; both genders ring and clash with heavy jewelry—I haven’t seen anything that wasn’t smooth or cabochon. Back in New Albuquerque, where the wind scours up from the south, there’s not a tufa-cone home that isn’t ornamented by stands of bells to catch the breeze . . . The air smells like grain baking in the sun . . . And here, in the jungle, a whole continent away, everything’s perpetually damp. Every evening I check my feet for fungus, even though she keeps repeating—ahh, strike that. Fungus isn’t sexy.”